Frankowski & Grossman - Tank 01 by Frankowski Leo

Author:Frankowski, Leo
Language: eng
Format: epub

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ON THE ATTACK

Orders were to advance at 12:05 at fifty kilometers per hour, with all our drones out in front.

I didn't like it.

Going underground, the tanks and drones could only do five km/hr, but then we would be reasonably well hidden and protected. Or, the top speed of the tanks in rough terrain was a hundred and forty, and by going in full bore we could perhaps surprise and overrun the Serbs, even though that would involve leaving the slower moving drones behind, or maybe carrying them with us. Either of these I could go along with.

Going in slow and exposed, I couldn't, and I didn't see where the drones would be all that much use on the attack. At best, they were a "Forlorn Hope" that would draw enemy fire, if the Serbians were dumber than we were. I said as much to the Combat Control Computer and it said, "No."

I knew what the general was thinking. Force the enemy to exhaust their limited forces and munitions, and we would win. The problem from my viewpoint was that he was planning for them to exhaust those munitions on me!

So my squad advanced at what seemed to me to be a dangerously slow pace, over a three-kilometer-wide front. We had eighty-four drones out in the lead, followed by our ten observerless tanks, with the four of us humans taking the rear. There was Quincy on the left, and then Zuzanna, me, and Radek. On both our flanks, as far as my sensors could read, other similar squads were advancing at the same pace we were. The general's plan was for a flanking advance three hundred and twenty kilometers wide. Modern warfare covers a lot of ground.

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None of us were happy, and the tension was so solid you could make armor out of it.

We had our infrared comlasers locked in on each other for communications, and we were setting up a string of IR repeaters that went all the way back to our old lines, with new repeaters being added every ten kilometers or so, to keep in touch with the Combat Control Computer. The problem is that when the shooting starts, dirt, vaporized osmium, and other crud tend to make the air about as transparent as my mother's gravy, and laser communication gets very spotty. If things get heavy, the clouds can get so thick that the comlasers can't penetrate at all. In both fights that I had been in so far, after the first two seconds, the comlasers had gone west, and I had been targeting the girls through the fiber-optic cables.

So as a backup, we were all laying fiber-optic cables behind us, all the way back to our original lines, where they tied together.

Six drones were set to start zigzagging behind us, to tie the fourteen long strands the tanks were laying into a sort of net. I didn't have them doing it yet because that configuration, which automatically patches around

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